Archive for the ‘novena’ Category

Last week, Nadya Peek from MIT’s CBA gave me the opportunity to play with their CT scanner. I had my Novena laptop with me, so we extracted the motherboard and slapped it into the scanner. Here are some snapshots of the ethernet jacks, which are enclosed metal boxes and thus a target for “intervention” (e.g. NSA ANT FIREWALK featuring their nifty TRINITY MCM).

Plus, it’s just fun to look at X-rays of your gear.

The X-ray reveals the expected array of ferrite cores implementing the transformers required by gigabit ethernet.

One of Novena’s most distinctive features is its FPGA co-processor. An FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array, is a sea of logic gates and memory elements that can be wired up according to hardware descriptions programmed in languages such as Verilog or VHDL. Verilog can be thought of as a very strictly typed C where every line of the code executes simultaneously. Thus, every bit of logic in Novena’s Spartan 6 LX45 FPGA could theoretically perform a computation every clock cycle — all 43,000 logic cells, 54,000 flip flops, and 58 fixed-point multiply accumulate DSP blocks. This potential for massive parallelism underlies one half of the exciting prospects enabled by an FPGA.

The other exciting half of an FPGA relates to its expansive I/O capabilities. Every signal pin of an FPGA can be configured to comply with a huge range of physical layer specifications, from vanilla CMOS to high-speed differential standards such as TMDS (used in HDMI) and SSTL (used to talk to DDR memories). Each signal pin is also backed by a high speed SERDES (serializer/deserializer) and sophisticated clock management technologies. Need a dozen high-precision PWM channels for robotics? No problem, an FPGA can easily do that. Need an HDMI interface or two? Also no problem. Need a bespoke 1000 MT/s ADC interface? Simple matter of programming – and all with the same set of signal pins.

Novena also hangs a 2Gbit DDR3 memory chip directly off the FPGA. The FPGA contains a dedicated memory controller that talks DDR3 at a rate of 800MT/s over a 16-bit bus, yielding a theoretical peak memory bandwidth of 12.8 Gbits/s. This fast, deep memory is useful for caching and buffering data locally.

Thus, the FPGA can be thought of as the ultimate hardware hacking primitive. In order to unlock the full potential of the FPGA, we decided to bring most of the spare I/Os on the chip to a high speed expansion header. The high speed header is a bit less convenient than Arduino shield connectors if all you need to do is flash an LED, but as a trade-off the header is rated for signal speeds of over a gigabit per second per pin.

However, the GPBB (General Purpose Breakout Board) featured as one of the Novena crowdfunding campaign stretch goals resolves this inconvenience by converting the high speed signal format into a much lower performance but more convenient 0.1” pin header format, suitable for most robotics and home automation projects.

Enter the Oscilloscope
A problem that xobs and I frequently encounter is the need for a highly programmable, travel-friendly oscilloscope. There’s a number of USB scope solutions that don’t quite cut it in terms of analog performance and UX, and there are no self-contained solutions we know of today that allow us to craft stimulus-response loops of the type needed for fuzzing, glitching, power analysis, or other similar hardware hacking techniques.

Fortunately, Novena is an ideal platform for implementing a bespoke oscilloscope solution – which we’ve gone ahead and done. Here’s a video demonstrating the basic functionality of our oscilloscope solution running on Novena (720p version in VP8 or H.264):

Novena was plugged into the large-screen TV via HDMI to make filming the video a little bit easier.

In a nutshell, the oscilloscope offers two 8-bit channels at 1GSPS or one 8-bit channel at 2GSPS with an analog bandwidth of up to 900MHz. As a side bonus we also wired in a set of 10 digital channels that can be used as a simple logic analyzer. Here’s some high resolution photos of the oscilloscope expansion board:

This combination of the oscilloscope expansion board plus Novena is a major step toward the realization of our dream of a programmable, travel-friendly oscilloscope. The design is still a couple revisions away from being production ready, but even in its current state it’s a useful hacking tool.

At this point, I’m going to geek out and talk about the tech behind the implementation of the oscilloscope board.

Oscilloscope Architecture
Below is a block diagram of the oscilloscope’s digital architecture.

The FPGA is configured to talk to an ADC08D1020 dual 1GSPS ADC, designed originally by National Semiconductor but now sold as TI. The interface to the ADC is a pair of 8-bit differential DDR busses, operating at up to 500MHz, which is demultiplexed 1:8 into a 64-bit internal datapath. Upon receipt of a trigger condition, the FPGA stores a real-time sample data from the ADC into local DDR3 memory, and later on the CPU can stream data out of the DDR3 memory via the Linux Generic Netlink API. Because the DDR3 memory’s peak bandwidth is only 1.6GSPS, deep buffer capture of 256 Msamples is only available for net sample rates below 1GSPS; higher sample rates are limited to the internal memory capacity of the FPGA, still a very usable 200 ksamples depth. The design is written in Verilog and consumes about 15% of the FPGA, leaving plenty of space for implementing other goodies like digital filters and other signal processing.

The ADC is clocked by an Analog Devices AD9520 PLL, which derives its time base from a TCXO. This PLL + TCXO combination gives us better jitter performance than the on-chip PLL of the FPGA, and also gives us more flexibility on picking sampling rates.

The power system uses a hybrid of boost, buck, and inverting switching regulators to bring voltages to the minimum-dropout required for point-of-use LDOs to provide clean power to sensitive analog subsystems. This hybrid approach makes the power system much more complex, but helps keep the power budget manageable.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of our oscilloscope design is the partitioning of the analog signal chain. Getting a signal from the point of measurement to the ADC is a major engineering challenge. Remarkably, the same passive probe I held in the 90’s is still a standard workhorse for scopes like my Tektronix TDS5104B almost a quarter century later. This design longevity is extremely rare in the world of electronics. With a bandwidth of several hundred MHz but an impedance measured in mega-ohms and a load capacitance measured in picofarads, it makes one wonder why we even bother with 50-ohm cables when we have stuff like oscilloscope probes. There’s a lot of science behind this, and as a result well-designed passive probes, such as the Tektronix P6139B, cost hundreds of dollars.

Unfortunately, high quality scope probes are made out of unicorn hair and unobtanium as far as I’m concerned, so when thinking about our design, I had to take a clean-sheet look at the problem. I decided to look at an active probe solution, whilst throwing away any notion of backward compatibility with existing scope probes.

I started the system design by first considering the wires (you can tell I’m a student of Tom Knight – one of his signature phrases is “it’s the wires, stupid!”). I concluded the cheapest high-bandwidth commodity cable that is also rated for a high insertion count is probably the SATA cable. It consists of two differential pairs and it has to support signal bandwidths measured in GHz, yet it costs just a couple of bucks. On the downside, any practical probing solution needs to present an impedance of almost a million times greater than that required by SATA, to avoid loading down the circuitry under test. This means we have to cram a high performance amplifier into a PCB that fits in the palm of your hand. Thankfully, Moore’s Law took care of that in the intervening decades from when passive oscilloscope probes were first invented out of necessity.

The LMH6518 is a single-chip solution for oscilloscope front-ends that is almost perfect for this scenario. It’s a 900 MHz, digitally controlled variable gain amplifier (VGA) with the added feature of an auxilliary output that’s well-suited for functioning as a trigger channel; conveniently, a SATA cable has two differential pairs, so we allocate one for measurement and one for trigger. We also strap a conventional 8-pin ribbon cable to the SATA cable for passing power and I2C.

The same LMH6518 VGA can be combined with a variety of front-end amplifiers to create a range of application-specific probes. We use a 1GHz FET op-amp (the ADA4817) to do the impedance transformation required of a “standard” digital oscilloscope. We use a relatively low impedance but “true differential” amplifier to measure voltages developed across a series sense resistor for power signature analysis. And we have a very high-impedance, high CMRR instrumentation amplifier front end for capturing signals developed across small loops and stubs of wire, useful for detecting parasitic electromagnetic emissions from circuits and cables.

However, the design isn’t quite perfect. The LMH6518 burns a lot of power – a little over a watt; and the pre-amp plus power regulators add about another watt overall to the probe’s power footprint. Two watts isn’t that bad on an absolute scale, but two watts in the palm of your hand is searing hot; the amplifier chip gets to almost 80C. So, I designed a set of custom aluminum heatsinks for the probes to help spread and dissipate the heat.

When I handed the aluminum-cased probes to xobs, I warned him that the heat sinks are either going to solve the heat issue, or it’s going to turn the probes into a ball of flaming hot metal. Unfortunately, the heatsink gets to about 60C in still air, which is an ergonomic challenge – the threshold for pain is typically around 45-50C, so it’s very uncomfortable to hold the aluminum cases directly. It’s alright to hold the probes by the plastic connectors on the back, but this requires special training and users will instinctively want to hold a probe by its body. So, probably I’ll have to do some thermal optimization of the design and add either a heat pipe to a large heatsink off the probe body, or use a small fan to force air over the probes. It turns out just a tiny bit of airflow is all that’s need to keep the probes cool, but with passive convection alone they are simply too hot to handle. This won’t, of course, stop us from using them as-is; we’re okay with having to be a little bit careful to gain access to a very capable device. However, nanny-state laws and potentially litigious customers make it too risky to sell this solution to end consumers right now.

Firmware Architecture

xobs defined the API for the oscilloscope. The driver is based upon the Generic Netlink API native to the Linux kernel, and relies upon the libnl-genl libraries for the user-space implementation. Out of the various APIs available in the Linux kernel to couple kernelspace to userspace, Netlink was the best match, as it is stream-oriented and inherently non-blocking. This API has been optimized for high throughput and low latency, since it is also the core of the IP network stacks that on servers push gigabits of bandwidth. It’s also more mature than the nascent Linux IIO subsystem.

In the case of xobs’ driver, he creates a custom generic netlink protocol which he registers with the name “kosagi-fpga”. Generic netlink sockets support the concept of specific commands, and he currently supports the following:

The current implementation provisions two memory-mapped address spaces for the CPU to communicate with the FPGA, split along two different chip select lines. Chip Select 0 (CS0) is used for simple messages and register settings, while Chip Select 1 (CS1) is used for streaming data to and from the FPGA. Therefore, when the CPU wants to set capture buffer sizes, trigger conditions, or initiate a transfer, it communicates using CS0. When it wants to stream data from the FPGA, it will do so via CS1.

The core of the API is the KOSAGI_CMD_TRIGGER_SAMPLE and KOSAGI_CMD_READ commands. To request a sample from the oscilloscope, the userspace program emits a KOSAGI_CMD_TRIGGER_SAMPLE command to the kosagi-fpga Netlink interface. This will cause the CPU to communicate with the FPGA via the CS0 EIM memory space control registers, setting up the trigger condition and the transfer FIFO from the FPGA.

The userspace program will then emit a KOSAGI_CMD_READ command to retrieve the data. Upon receiving the read command, the kernel initiates a burst read from CS1 EIM memory space to a kernel buffer using memcpy(), which is forwarded back to the userspace that requested the data using the genlmsg_unicast() Netlink API call. Userspace retrieves the data stream from the kernel by calling the nl_recv() API call.

This call is currently configured to block until the data is available for the userspace program, but it can also be configured to timeout as well. However, a timeout is generally not necessary as the call will succeed in a fraction of a millisecond due to the high speed and determinism of the transfer interface.

In addition to handling data transfers, the kernel module implementing this API also handles housekeeping functions, such as configuring the FPGA and controlling power to the analog front end. FPGA configuration is handled automatically upon driver load (via insmod, modprobe, or udev) via the request_firmware() API built into the Linux kernel. The FPGA bitstream is located in the kernel firmware directory, usually /lib/firmware/novena_fpga.bit.

Power management functions have their own dedicated Netlink commands. Calling these commands causes the respective GPIO for the expansion connector power switch to be toggled. When the expanion connector is power-cycled, the module also resets the FPGA and reloads its firmware, allowing for a complete reset of the expansion subsystem without having to power cycle the CPU.

Above: a snippet of a trace captured by the scope when probing a full-speed USB data line.

xobs also wrote a wonderful demo program in Qt for the oscilloscope, and through this we were able to do some preliminary performance characterization. The rise-time performance of the probe is everything I had hoped for, and the very long capture buffer provided by the FPGA’s DDR3 memory enables a new dimension of deep signal analysis. This, backed with Novena’s horsepower, tight integration with Linux and a hackable architecture makes for a compelling – and portable – signal analysis solution for field work.

If the prospect of a a hackable oscilloscope excites you as much as it does us, please consider backing our crowdfunding campaign for Novena and spreading the word to your friends; there’s only a few days left. Developing complex hardware and software systems isn’t cheap, and your support will enable us to focus on bringing more products like this to market.

When designing Novena, I had to balance budget against hackability. Plastic parts are cheap to produce, but the tools to mold them are very expensive and difficult to modify. Injection mold tooling cost for a conventional clamshell (two-body) laptop runs upwards of $250,000. In contrast, Novena’s single body design has a much lower tooling cost, making it feasible to amortize tooling costs over a smaller volume.

The decision to use flat sheet aluminum for the LCD bezel was also driven in part to reduce tooling costs. Production processing for aluminum can be done using CNC, virtually eliminating up-front tooling costs. Furthermore, aluminum has great hack value, as it can be cut, drilled, tapped, and bent with entry-level tools. This workability means end users can easily add connectors, buttons, sensors, and indicators to the LCD bezel. Users can even design in a custom LCD panel, since there’s almost no setup cost for machining aluminum.

One of my first mods to the bezel is a set of 3D-printed retainers, custom designed to work with my preferred keyboard. The retainers screw into a set of tapped M2.5 mounting holes around the periphery of the LCD.

The idea is that the retainers hold my keyboard against the LCD bezel when transporting the laptop, protecting the LCD from impact damage while making it a little more convenient for travel.

Such an easily customizable bezel means a limitless combination of keyboards and LCDs can be supported without requiring expensive modifications to injection molding tools.

The flat design also means it’s easy to laser-cut a bezel using other materials. Here’s an example made out of clear acrylic. The acrylic version looks quite pretty, although as a material acrylic is much softer and less durable than aluminum.

I also added a notch on the bottom part of the bezel to accommodate breakout boards plugged into the FPGA expansion connector.

The low up-front cost to modify and customize the bezel enables experimentation and serendipitous hacks. I’m looking forward to seeing what other Novena users do with their bezels!

Novena needs a logo. And we need you to help! Today we’re announcing a competition to design a logo for Novena, and the winner will get a desktop version of Novena and a T-shirt emblazoned with their logo.

The competition starts today. Submissions should be sent to novena@crowdsupply.com by the end of May 11th. On May 12th, all submissions will be posted in an update, and on May 15th we’ll pick a winner.

We’re also adding a $25 tier for backers who would like to receive a T-shirt with our new logo on it. The base color of the T-shirt will be royal blue, like the blue anodization of Novena’s bezel, and the base fit will be the American Apparel Jersey T-shirt (S,M,L,XL,2XL,3XL) or the Bella Girly Jersey V-Neck T-shirt (S,M,L,XL,2XL — ladies, Bella sizes run small, so round up for a comfortable fit). We aim to ship the T-shirts within 2 months of campaign conclusion.

For the logo, here are the guidelines for design:

Single-color design strongly preferred. However, a multi-color master design can work if a single-color variant also looks good.

No halftones or grayscale: logo must be screen printable, laser etchable, and chemically etchable.

Only submissions in vector format will be considered, but do include a PNG preview.

Target size is approximately 30mm-50mm x 10-15mm tall (printable on the lower left bezel or as an etched metal plaque screwed in place).

Target color is Pantone 420U (gray), but other color suggestions and schemes are welcome.

Ideally looks good backlit, so we can also make stickers that go on the exposed LCD backlight for a nice effect.

The design could say “Novena” or “novena”, but we’re open minded to other names or an icon with no text. Novena was an arbitrary code name we picked based on our naming scheme of Singapore MRT stations.

Design should not infringe on any other trademarks.

By submitting an entry, the submitter agrees to having their submission publicly posted for review and, if the submitter’s entry is selected as the winner, to automatically give Kosagi globally unlimited, royalty-free and exclusive use of the logo design, with a desktop version of Novena as the sole compensation for the single winning submission. Submitters retain the rights to non-winning submissions.

If you’ve already backed Novena at the desktop tier or above and you are the chosen winner, we will refund you the campaign value ($1,195) of the desktop pledge level.

Thanks in advance to everyone who will participate in the Novena logo design competition!

First, a heartfelt “thank you” to all those who have backed our crowdfunding campaign to bring Novena-powered open computing devices to the world. xobs and I are very flattered to have reached almost 70% of our goal already.

One excellent outcome of the campaign is a lot of people have reached out to us to extend the Novena platform and make it even better, and so we’re offering a diverse range of stretch goals to provide an even better open laptop for all walks of users.

We designed Novena to be the most open platform we could practically build. The hardware blueprints and software source code are available for download. The entire OS is buildable from human-readable source, and requires no binary blobs to boot and run well.

However, there are elements of the i.MX6 SoC that lie dormant, due to a lack of open source drivers. In particular, the 2D/3D graphics accelerator in the i.MX6 has closed-source drivers. While we don’t force you to use these closed-source drivers, a major impediment to us being “libre” is the lack of open source drivers for these components.

We’re excited to announce a partnership with Jon Nettleton, an expert on Linux graphics drivers, to enable this crucial piece of the libre puzzle. Here is a short statement from Jon Nettleton himself on the prospect:

Novena Backers and OSS enthusiasts,

I am very pleased to announce myself, Jon Nettleton (a.k.a. jnettlet, linux4kix), as a stretch-goal partner for the Novena Project. I will be taking on the task of assuring that the shipping Novena platforms will not require a binary userspace driver for 2D/3D graphics acceleration. Utilizing my experience working on Linux graphics drivers along with my strong community involvement, I will be making sure that contributing developers have everything they need to keep the Etnaviv driver project moving forward.

To accomplish this we are requesting an additional $10,000 of funding. This additional capital will be used to not just fund my development effort, but to also provide incentives for other contributing developers. It will also benefit me the time to coordinate with other hardware vendors interested in supporting an open source graphics driver implementation for the Vivante chipset, and getting them involved. There is no “US“ and “THEM” in this effort. “WE” will bring to fruition a modern graphics accelerated desktop platform for the Novena Project.

Therefore, if we can raise $50k over our original target of $250k, we will donate the $10k that Jon needs for the effort for providing open 2D/3D graphics drivers for the Novena platform. The remainder of that raised will be used to help cover the costs of building the hardware you ordered.

Significantly, since this is an open source effort, everyone in the i.MX6 community can benefit from the outcome of this funding. Because of this, we’ve added a “Buy Jon a Six Pack ($30)” pledge tier (capped at 417 pledges) so that existing i.MX6 users who want to contribute toward this goal without buying our hardware can participate. For every dollar contributed to this pledge tier, we will give Jon Nettleton at least 80 cents, regardless of our ability to reach the first stretch goal. The other ~20 cents go toward compulsory campaign operation costs and financial operator transaction fees.

Stretch #2: General-Purpose Breakout Board: +$100k ($350k total)

We include a FPGA and a nice high-speed connector, but many users just want to toggle a GPIO or take a simple analog reading without having to design and build a PCBA from scratch. If we can raise an additional $50k over the previous stretch goal, we will include a General Purpose Breakout Board (GPBB) with every piece of hardware we ship.

The GPBB buffers 16 FPGA outputs and 8 FPGA inputs to be compatible with either 3.3V or 5V, gang-selectable via software. It also provides six 10-bit analog inputs (up to 200ksps sample rate) and two 10bit analog outputs (~100ksps max rate), all broken out to an easy-to-use 40-pin male 0.1″ dual-row header.

The GPBB is handy for all kinds of control and sensing situations. Because the GPBB is backed by a powerful FPGA, each of the buffered FPGA output lines can be programmed for a wide range of applications. For example, an FPGA output could be configured as a precision PWM channel with hard-real time feedback control for demanding robotics motor driver applications. Or it can be used to interface with bespoke serial protocols, such as those found in modern LED strip lighting.

For user who don’t want to muck with FPGA code and prefer to grapple a GPIO from the command line, we have user-space drivers for the board prepared in Linux, through a combination of the Linux GPIO API, and the Linux I2C API. As a result it’s a snap to script up simple applications using your favorite high level language.

Significantly, the GPBB isn’t vaporware — we developed this board originally for use as a breakout for production testing circuit stickers from our Chibitronics product line. At this very moment, the GPBB design is being used to drive mass production of circuit stickers.

Stretch #3: ROMulator Breakout Board: +$150k ($400k total)

We designed Novena to be a versatile hacking tool. Case in point, last December we reported results at 30C3 revealing a secret knock that can allow arbitrary code execution on select SD card controllers. We discovered this in part with the assistance of Novena.

We used Novena as a ROMulator — a FLASH ROM emulator. For this application, we developed a flexible PCB that’s so thin, it can be soldered in between a TSOP FLASH ROM and the underlying PCB. In this mode, we can use the FPGA built into Novena to snoop the traffic going to and from the FLASH ROM.

Alternately, the FPGA can be used to emulate a ROM device using its local 256 MiB of DDR3 memory. Since the DDR3 controller implementation is multi-ported, during ROM emulation one can inspect and modify the ROM contents on the fly without disrupting target operation. This has a number of powerful applications, from ToC/ToU attacks to speeding up firmware development on devices that load from NAND.

If we can raise an additional $50k over the previous tier, we’ll include a ROMulator Breakout Board (in addition to the General Purpose Breakout Board) with every piece of hardware shipped.

Software! Defined! Radio! We’re very excited to offer the possibility of teaming up with MyriadRF, to provide a custom-made SDR solution for Novena. Their open hardware SDR solution operates in all the major radio bands, including LTE, CDMA, TD-CDMA, W-CDMA, WiMAX, 2G and many more.

The retail price of the MyriadRF is $299, and MyriadRF has graciously pulled strings with their fabrication partner and enabled a low minimum order quantity of 200 units to build this custom version for Novena. If we can clear a total raise of $500k or at least 200 total backers for the desktop/laptop/heirloom version, we’ll include with every desktop/laptop/heirloom version a MyriadRF SDR board. Since the MyriadRF is such a high ticket-item, only desktop and higher tiers are eligible to receive this reward.

Significantly, the MyriadRF extends beyond the front of the Novena case, so part of the money from this tier is going toward buying the extra tooling to provision a removable panel on the front edge of the case, so that when the SDR module is installed it can comfortably hang out of the case, giving easy access to the U.FL RF connectors.

If you find these stretch goals exciting and/or useful, please visit our campaign page and join the community helping to bring open hardware to the world, and please help us spread the word!